BY THE SAME AUTHOR 



CHICAGO POEMS. $1.30 net. 



HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
Publishers New York 



CORNHUSKERS 



BY 



CARL SANDBURG 




NEW YORK 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

1918 






Copyright, iqi8, 

BY 
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 



NOV -6 \m 



QUINN A BODEN CO. ?>R£e8 
RAHWAT, N. .i. 



©CI,A50805() 






TO 
JANET AND MARGARET 



Acknowledgement is set forth that some things here 
were first printed in Poetry : A Magazine of Verse, The 
Chicago Daily News, and the service of the Newspaper 
Enterprise Association. — C. S. 



CONTENTS 

CORNHUSKERS page 

Prairie ^ 

River Roads ^^ 

Prairie Waters by Night ^3 

Early Moon ^4 

Laughing Corn 5 

Autumn Movement ^" 

Falltime ^7 

Illinois Farmer 

Hits and Runs ^9 

Village in Late Summer 20 

Blizzard Notes ^^ 

Sunset From Omaha Hotel Window 22 

Still Life ^3 

Band Concert ^4 

Three Pieces on the Smoke of Autumn .... 25 

Localities ^^ 

Caboose Thoughts ^9 

Alix ^^ 

Potato Blossom Songs and Jigs 33 

Loam ^^ 

Manitoba Childe Roland . 38 

Wilderness ^° 

PERSONS HALF KNOWN 

Chicago Poet 45 

Fire-Logs 

Repetitions ^^ 

vii 



viii Contents 

PAGE 

Adelaide Crapsey 48 

Young Bullfrogs 49 

Memoir of a Proud Boy 50 

Bilbea 52 

Southern Pacific 53 

Washerwoman 54 

Portrait of a Motor Car 55 

Girl in a Cage 56 

Buffalo Bill 57 

Sixteen Months 58 

Child Margaret 59 

Singing Nigger 60 

LEATHER LEGGINGS 

Leather Leggings 63 

Prayers of Steel 65 

Always the Mob 66 

Jabberers 68 

Cartoon 69 

Interior 70 

Street Window 72 

Palladiums 73 

Clocks 74 

Legends 75 

Psalm of Those Who Go Forth Before Daylight . . 77 

Horses and Men in Rain 78 

Questionnaire 79 

Near Keokuk 80 

Slants at Buffalo, New York 81 

Flat Lands 82 

Lawyer 83 

Three Balls 84 



Contents ix 

PAGE 

Chicks 85 

Humdrum 86 

Joliet 87 

Knucks 88 

Testament , ... 90 

HAUNTS 

Valley Song 93 

In Tall Grass 94 

Upstairs 95 

Monosyllabic 96 

Films 97 

Kreisler 98 

The Sea Hold 99 

Goldwing Moth 100 

Loin Cloth lOi 

Hemlock and Cedar 102 

Summer Shirt Sale 103 

MedalHon 104 

Bricklayer Love 105 

Ashurnatsirpal HI 106 

Mammy Hums 107 

Bringers 108 

Crimson Rambler 109 

Haunts no 

Have Me in 

Fire Dreams 112 

^Baby Face .114 

The Year 115 

Drumnotes 116 

Moonset 117 

Garden Wireless 118 



X Contents 

PAGE 

Handfuls 119 

Cool Tombs 120 

SHENANDOAH 

Shenandoah 123 

New Feet 124 

Old Osawatomie 125 

Grass 126 

Flanders 127 

Gargoyle 128 

Old Timers 129 

House 130 

John Ericsson Day Memorial, 191 8 131 

Remembered Women 133 

Out of White Lips 134 

Memoir I35 

A Million Young Workmen, 1915 137 

Smoke 138 

A Tall Man 139 

The Four Brothers 141 



CORNHUSKERS 



PRAIRIE 

I WAS born on the prairie and the milk of its wheat, the 
red of its clover, the eyes of its women, gave me 
a song and a slogan. 

Here the water went down, the icebergs slid with gravel, 
the gaps and the valleys hissed, and the black loam 
came, and the yellow sandy loam. 

Here between the sheds of the Rocky Mountains and the 
Appalachians, here now a morning star fixes a fire 
sign over the timber claims and cow pastures, the 
corn belt, the cotton belt, the cattle ranches. 

Here the gray geese go five hundred miles and back 
with a wind under their wings honking the cry for 
a new home. 

Here I know I will hanker after nothing so much as 
one more sunrise or a sky moon of fire doubled 
to a river moon of water. 

The prairie sings to me in the forenoon and I know in 
the night I rest easy in the prairie arms, on the 
prairie heart. 

After the sunburn of the day 

handling a pitchfork at a hayrack, 

after the eggs and biscuit and cofifee, 

the pearl-gray haystacks 

in the gloaming 

are cool prayers 

to the harvest hands. 



4 Cornhuskers 

In the city among the walls the overland passenger train 
is choked and the pistons hiss and the wheels curse. 

On the prairie the overland flits on phantom wheels and 
the sky and the soil between them muffle the pistons 
and cheer the wheels. 

I am here when the cities are gone. 

I am here before the cities come. 

I nourished the lonely men on horses. 

I will keep the laughing men who ride iron. 

I am dust of men. 

The running water babbled to the deer, the cottontail, 

the gopher. 
You came in wagons, making streets and schools, 
Kin of the ax and rifle, kin of the plow and horse. 
Singing Yankee Doodle, Old Dan Tucker, Turkey in the 

Straw, 
You in the coonskin cap at a log house door hearing a 

lone wolf howl. 
You at a sod house door reading the blizzards and 

chinooks let loose from Medicine Hat, 
I am dust of your dust, as I am brother and mother 
To the copper faces, the worker in flint and clay, 
The singing women and their sons a thousand years 

ago 
Marching single file the timber and the plain. 

I hold the dust of these amid changing stars. 

I last while old wars are fought, while peace broods 

mother-like. 
While new wars arise and the fresh killings of young 

men. 



Prairie 5 

I fed the boys who went to France in great dark days. 
Appomattox is a beautiful word to me and so is Valley 

Forge and the Marne and Verdun, 
I who have seen the red births and the red deaths 
Of sons and daughters, I take peace or war, I say 

nothing and wait. 

Have you seen a red sunset drip over one of my corn- 
fields, the shore of night stars, the wave lines of 
dawn up a wheat valley? 

Have you heard my threshing crews yelling in the chaff 
of a strawpile and the running wheat of the wagon- 
boards, my cornhuskers, my harvest hands hauling 
crops, singing dreams of women, worlds, horizons? 

Rivers cut a path on flat lands. 

The mountains stand up. 

The salt oceans press in 

And push on the coast lines. 

The sun, the wind, bring rain 

And I know what the rainbow writes across 

the east or west in a half-circle : 
A love-letter pledge to come again. 

Towns on the Soo Line, 
Towns on the Big Muddy, 
Laugh at each other for cubs 
And tease as children. 

Omaha and Kansas City, Minneapolis and St. Paul, 
sisters in a house together, throwing slang, growing 

up. 
Towns in the Ozarks, Dakota wheat towns, Wichita, 
Peoria, Buffalo, sisters throwing slang, growing up. 



6 Cornhuskers 

Out of prairie-brown grass crossed with a streamer of 
wigwam smoke — out of a smoke pillar, a blue 
promise — out of wild ducks woven in greens and 
purples — 

Here I saw a city rise and say to the peoples round 
world : Listen, I am strong, I know what I want. 

Out of log houses and stumps — canoes stripped from 
tree-sides — flatboats coaxed with an ax from the 
timber claims — in the years when the red and the 
white men met — the houses and streets rose. 

A thousand red men cried and went away to new places 
for corn and women : a million white men came and 
put up skyscrapers, threw out rails and wires, feelers 
to the salt sea : now the smokestacks bite the skyline 
with stub teeth. 

In an early year the call of a wild duck woven in greens 
and purples: now the riveter's chatter, the police 
patrol, the song- whistle of the steamboat. 

To a man across a thousand years I offer a handshake. 
I say to him: Brother, make the story short, for the 
stretch of a thousand years is short. 

What brothers these in the dark? 

What eaves of skyscrapers against a smoke moon? 

These chimneys shaking on the lumber shanties 

When the coal boats plow by on the river — 

The hunched shoulders of the grain elevators — 

The flame sprockets of the sheet steel mills 

And the men in the rolling mills with their shirts off 



Prairie 7 

Playing their flesh arms against the twisting wrists of 
steel : 

what brothers these 

in the dark 

of a thousand years? 

A headlight searches a snowstorm. 

A funnel of white light shoots from over the pilot of 
the Pioneer Limited crossing Wisconsin. 

In the morning hours, in the dawn, 
The sun puts out the stars of the sky 
And the headlight of the Limited train. 

The fireman waves his hand to a country school teacher 
on a bobsled. 

A boy, yellow hair, red scarf and mittens, on the bob- 
sled, in his lunch box a pork chop sandwich and a 
V of gooseberry pie. 

The horses fathom a snow to their knees. 
Snow hats are on the rolling prairie hills. 
The Mississippi bluffs wear snow hats. 

Keep your hogs on changing corn and mashes of grain, 
O farmerman. 

Cram their insides till they waddle on short legs 
Under the drums of bellies, hams of fat. 
Kill your hogs with a knife slit under the ear. 
Hack them with cleavers. 
Hang them with hooks in the hind legs. 



8 Cornhuskers 

A wagonload of radishes on a summer morning. 

Sprinkles of dew on the crimson-purple balls. 

The farmer on the seat dangles the reins on the rumps 

of dapple-gray horses. 
The farmer's daughter with a basket of eggs dreams of 

a new hat to wear to the county fair. 

On the left- and right-hand side of the road. 

Marching corn — 
I saw it knee high weeks ago — now it is head high — 
tassels of red silk creep at the ends of the ears. 



rr. 



I am the prairie, mother of men, waiting. 

They are mine, the threshing crews eating beefsteak, the 
farmboys driving steers to the railroad cattle pens. 
S^ They are mine, the crowds of people at a Fourth of July 
basket picnic, listening to a lawyer read the Declara- 
tion of Independence, watching the pinwheels and 
Roman candles at night, the young men and women 
two by two hunting the bypaths and kissing bridges. 

They are mine, the horses looking over a fence in the 
frost of late October saying good-morning to the 
horses hauHng wagons of rutabaga to market. 

They are mine, the old zigzag rail fences, the new barb 
wire. "^ 

The cornhuskers wear leather on their hands. 

There is no let-up to the wind. 

Blue bandannas are knotted at the ruddy chins. 

Falltime and winter apples take on the smolder of the 
five-o'clock November sunset: falltime, leaves, bon- 
fires, stubble, the old things go, and the earth is 
grizzled. 



Prairie 9 

The land and the people hold memories, even among the 
anthills and the angleworms, among the toads and 
woodroaches — among gravestone writings rubbed 
out by the rain — they keep old things that never 
grow old. 

The frost loosens corn husks. 
The sun, the rain, the wind 

loosen corn husks. 
The men and women are helpers. 
They are all cornhuskers together. 
I see them late in the western evening 

in a smoke-red dust. 

The phantom of a yellow rooster flaunting a scarlet 
comb, on top of a dung pile crying hallelujah to 
the streaks of dayhght. 

The phantom of an old hunting dog nosing in the under- 
brush for muskrats, barking at a coon in a treetop 
at midnight, chewing a bone, chasing his tail round 
a corncrib. 

The phantom of an old workhorse taking the steel point 
of a plow across a forty-acre field in spring, hitched 
to a harrow in summer, hitched to a wagon among 
cornshocks in fall, 

These phantoms come into the talk and wonder of 
people on the front porch of a farmhouse late 
summer nights. 

" The shapes that are gone are here," said an old man 
with a cob pipe in his teeth one night in Kansas 
with a hot wind on the alfalfa. 



10 Cornhuskers 

Look at six eggs 

In a mockingbird's nest. 

Listen to six mockingbirds 
Flinging follies of O-be-joyful 
Over the marshes and uplands. 

Look at songs 
Hidden in eggs. 

When the morning sun is on the trumpet-vine blossoms, 
sing at the kitchen pans : Shout All Over God's 
Heaven. 

When the rain slants on the potato hills and the sun 
plays a silver shaft on the last shower, sing to the 
bush at the backyard fence : Mighty Lak a Rose. 

When the icy sleet pounds on the storm windows and 
the house lifts to a great breath, sing for the out- 
side hills : The Ole Sheep Done Know the Road, 
the Young Lambs Must Find the Way. 

Spring slips back with a girl face calling always : " Any 
new songs for me ? Any new songs ? " 

O prairie girl, be lonely, singing, dreaming, waiting — 
your lover comes — your child comes — the years 
creep with toes of April rain on new-turned sod. 

O prairie girl, whoever leaves you only crimson poppies 
to talk with, whoever puts a good-by kiss on your 
lips and never comes back — 

There is a song deep as the falltime redhaws, long as 
the layer of black loam we go to, the shine of the 
morning star over the corn belt, the wave line of 
dawn up a wheat valley. 



Prairie 1 1 

prairie mother, I am one of your boys. 

1 have loved the prairie as a man with a heart shot 

full of pain over love. 
Here I know I will hanker after nothing so much as 
one more sunrise or a sky moon of fire doubled to 
a river moon of water. 

I speak of new cities and new people. 
I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes. 
I tell you yesterday is a wind gone down, 

a sun dropped in the west. 
I tell you there is nothing in the world 

only an ocean of to-morrows, 

a sky of to-morrows. 

I am a brother of the cornhuskers who say 
at sundown : 

To-morrow is a day. 



RIVER ROADS 

Let the crows go by hawking their caw and caw. 
They have been swimming in midnights of coal mines 

somewhere. 
Let 'em hawk their caw and caw. 

Let the woodpecker drum and drum on a hickory stump. 
He has been swimming in red and blue pools somewhere 

hundreds of years 
And the blue has gone to his wings and the red has 

gone to his head. 
Let his red head drum and drum. 

Let the dark pools hold the birds in a looking-glass. 
And if the pool wishes, let it shiver to the blur of many 
wings, old swimmers from old places. 

Let the redwing streak a line of vermillion on the green 

wood lines. 
And the mist along the river fix its purple in lines of 

a woman's shawl on lazy shoulders. 



12 



PRAIRIE WATERS BY NIGHT 

Chatter of birds two by two raises a night song joining 
a litany of running water — sheer waters showing the 
russet of old stones remembering many rains. 

And the long willows drowse on the shoulders of the 
running water, and sleep from much music; joined 
songs of day-end, feathery throats and stony waters, 
in a choir chanting new psalms. 

It is too much for the long willows when low laughter 
of a red moon comes down ; and the willows drowse 
and sleep on the shoulders of the running water. 



13 



EARLY MOON 

The baby moon, a canoe, a silver papoose canoe, sails 

and sails in the Indian west. 
A ring of silver foxes, a mist of silver foxes, sit and sit 

around the Indian moon. 
One yellow star for a runner, and rows of blue stars 

for more runners, keep a line of watchers. 
O foxes, baby moon, runners, you are the panel of 

memory, fire-white writing to-night of the Red 

Man's dreams. 
Who squats, legs crossed and arms folded, matching its 

look against the moon-face, the star-faces, of the 

West? 
Who are the Mississippi Valley ghosts, of copper fore- 
heads, riding wiry ponies in the night? — no bridles, 

love-arms on the pony necks, riding in the night 

a long old trail? 
Why do they always come back when the silver foxes 

sit around the early moon, a silver papoose, in the 

Indian west ? 



14 



LAUGHING CORN 

There was a high majestic fooHng 
Day before yesterday in the yellow corn. 

And day after to-morrow in the yellow com 
There will be high majestic fooling. 

The ears ripen in late summer 

And come on with a conquering laughter, 

Come on with a high and conquering laughter. 

The long-tailed blackbirds are hoarse. 

One of the smaller blackbirds chitters on a stalk 

And a spot of red is on its shoulder 

And I never heard its name in my life. 

Some of the ears are bursting. 

A white juice works inside. 

Cornsilk creeps in the end and dangles in the wind. 

Always — I never knew it any other way — 

The wind and the corn talk things over together. 

And the rain and the corn and the sun and the corn 

Talk things over together. 

Over the road is the farmhouse. 
The siding is white and a green blind is slung loose. 
It will not be fixed till the corn is husked. 
The farmer and his wife talk things over together. 

15 



AUTUMN MOVEMENT 

I CRIED over beautiful things knowing no beautiful thing 
lasts. 

The field of cornflower yellow is a scarf at the neck of 
the copper sunburned woman, the mother of the 
year, the taker of seeds. 

The northwest wind comes and the yellow is torn full 
of holes, new beautiful things come in the first spit 
of snow on the northwest wind, and the old things 
go, not one lasts. 



i6 



FALLTIME 

Gold of a ripe oat straw, gold of a southwest moon, 
Canada thistle blue and flimmering larkspur blue, 
Tomatoes shining in the October sun with red hearts. 
Shining five and six in a row on a wooden fence, 
Why do you keep wishes on your faces all day long. 
Wishes like women with half -forgotten lovers going to 

new cities? 
What is there for you in the birds, the birds, the birds, 

crying down on the north wind in September, acres 

of birds spotting the air going south? 
Is there something finished? And some new beginning 

on the way? 



-7 



ILLINOIS FARMER 

Bury this old Illinois farmer with respect. 

He slept the Illinois nights of his life after days of work 

in Illinois cornfields. 
Now he goes on a long sleep. 
The wind he listened to in the cornsilk and the tassels, 

the wind that combed his red beard zero mornings 

when the snow lay white on the yellow ears in the 

bushel basket at the corncrib, 
The same wind will now blow over the place here where 

his hands must dream of Illinois corn. 



i8 



HITS AND RUNS 

I REMEMBER the ChilHcothe ball players grappling the 

Rock Island ball players in a sixteen-inning game 

ended by darkness. 
And the shoulders of the ChilHcothe players were a red 

smoke against the sundown and the shoulders of 

the Rock Island players were a yellow smoke against 

the sundown. 
And the umpire's voice was hoarse calling balls and 

strikes and outs and the umpire's throat fought in 

the dust for a song. 



19 



VILLAGE IN LATE SUMMER 

Lips half-willing in a doorway. 
Lips half-singing at a window. 
Eyes half-dreaming in the walls. 
Feet half-dancing in a kitchen. 
Even the clocks half-yawn the hours 
And the farmers make half-answers. 



20 



BLIZZARD NOTES 

I don't blame the kettle drums — they are hungry. 

And the snare drums — I know what they want — they 

are empty too. 
And the harring booming bass drums — they are hungriest 

of all. 

The howling spears of the Northwest die down. 

The lullabies of the Southwest get a chance, a mother 

song. 
A cradle moon rides out of a torn hole in the ragbag 

top of the sky. 



21 



SUNSET FROM OMAHA HOTEL WINDOW 

Into the blue river hills 

The red sun runners go 

And the long sand changes 

And to-day is a goner 

And to-day is not worth haggling over. 

Here in Omaha 
The gloaming is bitter 
As in Chicago 
Or Kenosha. 

The long sand changes. 

To-day is a goner. 

Time knocks in another brass nail. 

Another yellow plunger shoots the dark. 

Constellations 
Wheeling over Omaha 
As in Chicago 
Or Kenosha. 

The long sand is gone 

and all the talk is stars. 
They circle in a dome over Nebraska. 



32 



STILL LIFE 

Cool your heels on the rail of an observation car. 

Let the engineer open her up for ninety miles an hour. 

Take in the prairie right and left, rolling land and new 

hay crops, swaths of new hay laid in the sun. 
A gray village flecks by and the horses hitched in front 

of the post-office never blink an eye. 
A barnyard and fifteen Holstein cows, dabs of white on 

a black wall map, never bUnk an eye. 
A signalman in a tower, the outpost of Kansas City, 

keeps his place at a window with the serenity of a 

bronze statue on a dark night when lovers pass 

whispering. 



23 



BAND CONCERT 

Band concert public square Nebraska city. Flowing and 
circling dresses, summer-white dresses. Faces, flesh 
tints flung like sprays of cherry blossoms. And gig- 
glers, God knows, gigglers, rivaling the pony whin- 
nies of the Livery Stable Blues. 

Cowboy rags and nigger rags. And boys driving sorrel 
horses hurl a cornfield laughter at the girls in 
dresses, summer-white dresses. Amid the cornet 
staccato and the tuba oompa, gigglers, God knows, 
gigglers daffy with life's razzle dazzle. 

Slow good-night melodies and Home Sweet Home. And 
the snare drummer bookkeeper in a hardware store 
nods hello to the daughter of a railroad conductor — 
a giggler, God knows, a giggler — and the summer- 
white dresses filter fanwise out of the public square. 

The crushed strawberries of ice cream soda places, the 
night wind in cottonwoods and willows, the lattice 
shadows of doorsteps and porches, these know more 
of the story. 



24 



THREE PIECES ON THE SMOKE OF AUTUMN 

Smoke of autumn Is on it all. 

The streamers loosen and travel. 

The red west is stopped with a gray haze. 

They fill the ash trees, they wrap the oaks, 

They make a long-tailed rider 

In the pocket of the first, the earliest evening star. 

Three muskrats swim west on the Desplaines River. 

There is a sheet of red ember glow on the river; it is 
dusk; and the muskrats one by one go on patrol 
routes west. 

Around each slippery padding rat, a fan of ripples; in 
the silence of dusk a faint wash of ripples, the 
padding of the rats going west, in a dark and shiver- 
ing river gold. 

(A newspaper in my pocket says the Germans pierce 
the Italian line; I have letters from poets and 
sculptors in Greenwich Village; I have letters from 
an ambulance man in France and an I. W. W. man 
in Vladivostok.) 

I lean on an ash and watch the lights fall, the red ember 
glow, and three muskrats swim west in a fan of 
ripples on a sheet of river gold. 



25 



26 Cornhuskers 

Better the blue silence and the gray west. 

The autumn mist on the river, 

And not any hate and not any love, 

And not anything at all of the keen and the deep 

Only the peace of a dog head on a barn floor. 

And the new corn shoveled in bushels 

And the pumpkins brought from the com rows, 

Umber lights of the dark, 

Umber lanterns of the loam dark. 

Here a dog head dreams. 
Not any hate, not any love. 
Not anything but dreams. 
Brother of dusk and umber. 



LOCALITIES 

Wagon Wheel Gap is a place I never saw 

And Red Horse Gulch and the chutes of Cripple Creek. 

Red-shirted miners picking in the sluices, 
Gamblers with red neckties in the night streets, 
The fly-by-night towns of Bull Frog and Skiddoo, 
The night-cool limestone white of Death Valley, 
The straight drop of eight hundred feet 
From a shelf road in the Hasiampa Valley: 
Men and places they are I never saw. 

I have seen three White Horse taverns. 
One in Illinois, one in Pennsylvania, 
One in a timber-hid road of Wisconsin. 

I bought cheese and crackers 

Between sun showers in a place called White Pigeon 
Nestling with a blacksmith shop, a post-office, 
And a berry-crate factory, where four roads cross. 

On the Pecatonica River near Freeport 
I have seen boys run barefoot in the leaves 
Throwing clubs at the walnut trees 
In the yellow-and-gold of autumn. 

And there was a brown mash dry on the inside of their 
hands. 

27 



28 Gornhuskers 

On the Cedar Fork Creek of Knox County 
I know how the fingers of late October 
Loosen the hazel nuts. 
I know the brown eyes of half-open hulls. 
I know boys named Lindquist, Swanson, Hildebrand. 
I remember their cries when the nuts were ripe. 
And some are in machine shops ; some are in the navy ; 
And some are not on payrolls anywhere. 
Their mothers are through waiting for them to come 
home. 



CABOOSE THOUGHTS 

It's going to come out all right — do you know ? 
The sun, the birds, the grass — they know. 
They get along — and we'll get along. 

Some days will be rainy and you will sit waiting 
And the letter you wait for won't come, 
And I will sit watching the sky tear off gray and gray 
And the letter I wait for won't come. 

There will be ac-ci-dents. 

I know ac-ci-dents are coming. 

Smash-ups, signals wrong, washouts, trestles rotten, 

Red and yellow ac-ci-dents. 

But somehow and somewhere the end of the run 

The train gets put together again 

And the caboose and the green tail lights 

Fade down the right of way like a new white hope. 

I never heard a mockingbird in Kentucky 
Spilling its heart in the morning. 

I never saw the snow on Chimborazo. 
It's a high white Mexican hat, I hear. 

I never had supper with Abe Lincoln. 
Nor a dish of soup with Jim Hill. 

29 



30 Cornhuskers 

But I've been around. 

I know some of the boys here who can go a little. 

I know girls good for a burst of speed any time. 

I heard Williams and Walker 

Before Walker died in the bughouse. 

I knew a mandolin player 

Working in a barber shop in an Indiana town, 

And he thought he had a milHon dollars. 

I knew a hotel girl in Des Moines. 

She had eyes ; I saw her and said to myself 

The sun rises and the sun sets in her eyes. 

I was her steady and her heart went pit-a-pat. 

We took away the money for a prize waltz at a Brother- 
hood dance. 

She had eyes ; she was safe as the bridge over the Mis- 
sissippi at Burlington; I married her. 

Last summer we took the cushions going west. 

Pike's Peak is a big old stone, believe me. 

It's fastened down ; something you can count on. 

It's going to come out all right — do you know? 
The sun, the birds, the grass — they know. 
They get along — and we'll get along. 



ALIX 

The mare Alix breaks the world's trotting record one 
day. I see her heels flash down the dust of an 
Illinois race track on a summer afternoon. I see 
the timekeepers put their heads together over stop- 
watches, and call to the grand stand a split second 
is clipped off the old world's record and a new 
world's record fixed. 

I see the mare Alix led away by men in undershirts and 
streaked faces. Dripping Alix in foam of white on 
the harness and shafts. And the men in undershirts 
kiss her ears and rub her nose, and tie blankets on 
her, and take her away to have the sweat sponged. 

I see the grand stand jammed with prairie people yelling 
themselves hoarse. Almost the grand stand and the 
crowd of thousands are one pair of legs and one 
voice standing up and yelling hurrah. 

I see the driver of Alix and the owner smothered in a 
fury of handshakes, a mob of caresses. I see the 
wives of the driver and owner smothered in a crush 
of white summer dresses and parasols. 

Hours later, at sundown, gray dew creeping on the sod 
and sheds, I see Alix again : 
Dark, shining-velvet Alix, 
Night-sky Alix in a gray blanket, 
31 



32 Cornhuskers 

Led hack and forth by a nigger. 
Velvet and night-eyed Alix 
With slim legs of steel. 

And I want to rub my nose against the nose of the mare 
Alix. 



POTATO BLOSSOM SONGS AND JIGS 

Rum tiddy um, 

tiddy um, 

tiddy um tum turn. 
My knees are loose-like, my feet want to sling their 

selves. 
I feel like tickling you under the chin — honey — and 

a-asking: Why Does a Chicken Cross the Road? 
When the hens are a-laying eggs, and the roosters pluck- 

pluck-put-akut and you — honey — put new potatoes 

and gravy on the table, and there ain't too much 

rain or too little : 

Say, why do I feel so gabby ? 

Why do I want to holler all over the place? 

Do you remember I held empty hands to you 
and I said all is yours 
the handfuls of nothing? 

I ask you for white blossoms. 

I bring a concertina after sunset under the apple trees. 
I bring out " The Spanish Cavalier " and " In the Gloam- 
ing, O My Darling." 

The orchard here is near and home-like. 
The oats in the valley run a mile. 
Between are the green and marching potato vines. 
The lightning bugs go criss-cross carrying a zigzag of 
fire: the potato bugs are asleep under their stiff 
33 



34 Cornhuskers 

and yellow-striped wings: here romance stutters to 
the western stars, "Excuse . . . me . . ." 



Old foundations of rotten wood. 

An old barn done-for and out of the wormholes ten- 
legged roaches shook up and scared by sunlight. 
So a pickax digs a long tooth with a short memory. 
Fire can not eat this rubbish till it has lain in the sun. 

The story lags. 

The story has no connections. 

The story is nothing but a lot of banjo plinka planka 
plunks. 

The roan horse is young and will learn: the roan horse 
buckles into harness and feels the foam on the collar 
at the end of a haul: the roan horse points four 
legs to the sky and rolls in the red clover : the roan 
horse has a rusty jag of hair between the ears 
hanging to a white star between the eyes. 

In Burlington long ago 

And later again in Ashtabula 

I said to myself : 

I wonder how far Ophelia went with Hamlet. 
What else was there Shakespeare never told? 
There must have been something. 
If I go bugs I want to do it like Ophelia. 
There was class to the way she went out of her head. 

Does a famous poet eat watermelon? 
Excuse me, ask me something easy. 



Potato Blossom Songs and Jigs 35 

I have seen farmhands with their faces in fried catfish 
on a Monday morning. 

And the Japanese, two-legged like us, 

The Japanese bring slices of watermelon into pictures. 

The black seeds make oval polka dots on the pink meat. 

Why do I always think of niggers and buck-and-wing 
dancing whenever I see watermelon ? 

Summer mornings on the docks I walk among bushel 
peach baskets piled ten feet high. 

Summer mornings I smell new wood and the river wind 
along with peaches. 

I listen to the steamboat whistle hong-honging, hong- 
honging across the town. 

And once I saw a teameo straddling a street with a hay- 
rack load of melons. 

Niggers play banjos because they want to. 
The explanation is easy. 

It is the same as why people pay fifty cents for tickets 

to a policemen's masquerade ball or a grocers-and- 

butchers' picnic with a fat man's foot race. 
It is the same as why boys buy a nickel's worth of 

peanuts and eat them and then buy another nickel's 

worth. 
Newsboys shooting craps in a back alley have a fugitive 

understanding of the scientific principle involved. 
The jockey in a yellow satin shirt and scarlet boots, 

riding a sorrel pony at the county fair, has a grasp 

of the theory. 



36 Cornhuskers 

It is the same as why boys go running lickety-split 
away from a school-room geography lesson 
in April when the crawfishes come out 
and the young frogs are calling 
and the pussywillows and the cat-tails 
know something about geography themselves. 

I ask you for white blossoms. 

I offer you memories and people. 

I offer you a fire zigzag over the green and marching 

vines. 
I bring a concertina after supper under the home-like 

apple trees. 
I make up songs about things to look at: 

potato blossoms in summer night mist filling the 

garden with white spots ; 
a cavalryman's yellow silk handkerchief stuck in 
a flannel pocket over the left side of the shirt, 
over the ventricles of blood, over the pumps of 
the heart. 

Bring a concertina after sunset under the apple trees. 
Let romance stutter to the western stars, " Excuse . . . 
me . . ." 



LOAM 

In the loam we sleep, 

In the cool moist loam, 

To the lull of years that pass 

And the break of stars, 

From the loam, then, 
The soft warm loam, 

We rise: 
To shape of rose leaf. 
Of face and shoulder. 

We stand, then. 

To a whiff of Hfe, 
Lifted to the silver of the sun 
Over and out of the loam 

A day. 



37 



MANITOBA CHILDE ROLAND 

Last night a January wind was ripping at the shingles 
over our house and whistHng a wolf song under the 
eaves. 

I sat in a leather rocker and read to a six-year-old girl 
the Browning poem, Childe Roland to the Dark 
Tower Came. 

And her eyes had the haze of autumn hills and it was 
beautiful to her and she could not understand. 

A man is crossing a big prairie, says the poem, and 
nothing happens — and he goes on and on — and it's 
all lonesome and empty and nobody home. 

And he goes on and on — and nothing happens — and he 
comes on a horse's skull, dry bones of a dead horse — 
and you know more than ever it's all lonesome and 
empty and nobody home. 

And the man raises a horn to his lips and blows — ^he 
fixes a proud neck and forehead toward the empty 
sky and the empty land — and blows one last wonder- 
cry. 

And as the shuttHng automatic memory of man clicks 
off its results willy-nilly and inevitable as the snick 
of a mouse-trap or the trajectory of a 42-centimeter 
projectile, 

38 



Manitoba Childe Roland 39 

I flash to the form of a man to his hips in snow drifts 
of Manitoba and Minnesota—in the sled derby run 
from Winnipeg to MinneapoHs. 

He is beaten in the race the first day out of Winnipeg— 
the lead dog is eaten by four team mates — and the 
man goes on and on — running while the other racers 
ride— running while the other racers sleep — 

Lost in a blizzard twenty-four hours, repeating a circle 
of travel hour after hour— fighting the dogs who 

dig holes in the snow and whimper for sleep 

pushing on— running and walking five hundred 
miles to the end of the race— almost a winner— one 
toe frozen, feet blistered and frost-bitten. 

And I know why a thousand young men of the North- 
west meet him in the finishing miles and yell cheers 
—I know why judges of the race call him a winner 
and give him a special prize even though he is a 
loser. 

I know he kept under his shirt and around his thudding 
heart amid the blizzards of five hundred miles that 
one last wonder-cry of Childe Roland— and I told 
the six-year-old girl all about it. 

And while the January wind was ripping at the shingles 
and whistling a wolf song under the eaves, her eyes 
had the haze of autumn hills and it was beautiful 
to her and she could not understands 



WILDERNESS 

There is a wolf in me . . . fangs pointed for tearing 
gashes ... a red tongue for raw meat . . . and 
the hot lapping of blood — I keep this wolf because 
the wilderness gave it to me and the wilderness will 
not let it go. 

There is a fox in me . . .a silver-gray fox ... I 
sniff and guess ... I pick things out of the wind 
and air ... I nose in the dark night and take 
sleepers and eat them and hide the feathers ... I 
circle and loop and double-cross. 

There is a hog in me . . .a snout and a belly . . . 
a machinery for eating and grunting ... a ma- 
chinery for sleeping satisfied in the sun — I got this 
too from the wilderness and the wilderness will not 
let it go. 

There is a fish in me . . .1 know I came from salt- 
blue water-gates ... I scurried with shoals of 
herring ... I blew waterspouts with porpoises 
. . . before land was . . . before the water went 
down . . . before Noah . . . before the first 
chapter of Genesis. 

There is a baboon in me . . . clambering-clawed 
. . . dog-faced . . . yawping a galoot's hunger 
. . . hairy under the armpits . . . here are the 
40 



Wilderness 41 

hawk-eyed hankering men . . . here are the 
blond and blue-eyed women . . . here they hide 
curled asleep waiting . . . ready to snarl and kill 
. . . ready to sing and give milk . . . waiting— I 
keep the baboon because the wilderness says so. 

There is an eagle in me and a mockingbird ... and 
the eagle flies among the Rocky Mountains of my 
dreams and fights among the Sierra crags of what 
I want ... and the mockingbird warbles in the 
early forenoon before the dew is gone, warbles in 
the underbrush of my Chattanoogas of hope, gushes 
over the blue Ozark foothills of my wishes— And 
I got the eagle and the mockingbird from the wil- 
derness. 

O, I got a zoo, I got a menagerie, inside my ribs, under 
my bony head, under my red-valve heart— and I got 
something else : it is a man-child heart, a woman- 
child heart: it is a father and mother and lover: 
it came from God-Knows- Where : it is going to 
God-Knows- Where— For I am the keeper of the 
zoo : I say yes and no : I sing and kill and work : 
I am a pal of the world : I came from the wilderness. 



PERSONS HALF KNOWN 



CHICAGO POET 

T SALUTED a nobody. 

I saw him in a looking-glass. 

He smiled — so did I. 

He crumpled the skin on his forehead, 

frowning — so did I. 
Everything I did he did. 
I said, " Hello, I know you." 
And I was a liar to say so. 

Ah, this looking-glass man! 
Liar, fool, dreamer, play-actor. 
Soldier, dusty drinker of dust — 
Ah! he will go with me 
Down the dark stairway 
When nobody else is looking, 
When everybody else is gone. 

He locks his elbow in mine, 
I lose all — but not him. 



45 



FIRE-LOGS 

Nancy Hanks dreams by the fire ; 
Dreams, and the logs sputter, 
And the yellow tongues climb. 
Red lines lick their way in flickers. 
Oh, sputter, logs. 

Oh, dream, Nancy. 
Time now for a beautiful child. 
Time now for a tall man to come. 



46 



REPETITIONS 

They are crying salt tears 
Over the beautiful beloved body 
Of Inez Milholland, 
Because they are glad she lived, 
Because she loved open-armed, 
Throwing love for a cheap thing 
Belonging to everybody — 
Cheap as sunlight, 
And morning air. 



47 



ADELAIDE CRAPSEY 

Among the bumble-bees in red-top hay, a freckled field 
of brown-eyed Susans dripping yellow leaves in 

July, 

I read your heart in a book. 

And your mouth of blue pansy — I know somewhere I 
have seen it rain-shattered. 

And I have seen a woman with her head flung between 
her naked knees, and her head held there Hstening 
to the sea, the great naked sea shouldering a load 
of salt. 

And the blue pansy mouth sang to the sea : 

Mother of God, I'm so little a thing, 
Let me sing longer, 
Only a little longer. 

And the sea shouldered its salt in long gray combers 
hauling new shapes on the beach sand. 



48 



YOUNG BULLFROGS 

Jimmy Wimbledon listened a first week in June. 
Ditches along prairie roads of Northern Illinois 
Filled the arch of night with young bullfrog songs. 
Infinite mathematical metronomic croaks rose and spoke, 
Rose and sang, rose in a choir of puzzles. 
They made his head ache with riddles of music. 
They rested his head with beaten cadence. 
Jimmy Wimbledon listened. 



49 



MEMOIR OF A PROUD BOY 

He lived on the wings of storm. 
The ashes are in Chihuahua. 

Out of Ludlow and coal towns in Colorado 

Sprang a vengeance of Slav miners, Italians, Scots, 

Cornishmen, Yanks. 
Killings ran under the spoken commands of this boy 
With eighty men and rifles on a hogback mountain. 

They killed swearing to remember 

The shot and charred wives and children 

In the burnt camp of Ludlow, 

And Louis Tikas, the laughing Greek, 

Plugged with a bullet, clubbed with a gun butt. 

As a home war 

It held the nation a week 

And one or two million men stood together 

And swore by the retribution of steel. 

It was all accidental. 
He lived flecking lint off coat lapels 
Of men he talked with. 
He kissed the miners' babies 
And wrote a Denver paper 
Of picket silhouettes on a mountain line. 

50 



Memoir of a Proud Boy 51 

He had no mother but Mother Jones 

Crying from a jail window of Trinidad : 

"All I want is room enough to stand 

And shake my fist at the enemies of the human race." 

Named by a grand jury as a murderer 

He went to Chihuahua, forgot his old Scotch name. 

Smoked cheroots with Pancho Villa 

And wrote letters of Villa as a rock of the people. 

How can I tell how Don Magregor went? 

Three riders emptied lead into him. 

He lay on the main street of an inland town. 

A boy sat near all day throwing stones 

To keep pigs away. 

The Villa men buried him in a pit 
With twenty Carranzistas. 

There is drama in that point . . ,. 

... the boy and the pigs. 

Griffith would make a movie of it to fetch sobs. 

Victor Herbert would have the drums whirr 

In a weave with a high fiddle-string's single clamor. 

" And the muchacho sat there all day throwing stones 
To keep the pigs away," wrote Gibbons to the Tribune. 

Somewhere in Chihuahua or Colorado 

Is a leather bag of poems and short stories. 



BILBEA 

(From tablet writing, Babylonian excavations of 4th 
millennium B.C.) 

BiLBEA, I was in Babylon on Saturday night. 
I saw nothing of you anywhere. 

I was at the old place and the other girls were there, 
but no Bilbea. 

Have you gone to another house ? or city ? 

Why don't you write ? 

I was sorry. I walked home half-sick. 

Tell me how it goes. 

Send me some kind of a letter. 

And take care of yourself. 



52 



SOUTHERN PACIFIC 

Huntington sleeps in a house six feet long. 
Huntington dreams of railroads he built and owned. 
Huntington dreams of ten thousand men saying: Yes, 
sir. 

Blithery sleeps in a house six feet long. 

Blithery dreams of rails and ties he laid. 

Blithery dreams of saying to Huntington: Yes, sir. 

Huntington, 

Blithery, sleep in houses six feet long. 



53 



WASHERWOMAN 

The washerwoman is a member of the Salvation Army. 

And over the tub of suds rubbing underwear clean 

She sings that Jesus will wash her sins away 

And the red wrongs she has done God and man 

Shall be white as driven snow. 

Rubbing underwear she sings of the Last Great Washday. 



54 



PORTRAIT OF A MOTOR CAR 

It's a lean car ... a long-legged dog of a car . . .a 

gray-ghost eagle car. 
The feet of it eat the dirt of a road ... the wings of 

it eat the hills. 
Danny the driver dreams of it when he sees women in 

red skirts and red sox in his sleep. 
It is in Danny's life and runs in the blood of him . ,. -. 

a lean gray-ghost car. 



55 



GIRL IN A CAGE 

Here in a cage the dollars come down. 
To the click of a tube the dollars tumble. 
And out of a mouth the dollars run. 

I finger the dollars, 
Paper and silver, 
Thousands a day. 

Some days it's fun 

to finger the dollars. 
Some days . . . 

the dollars keep on 
in a sob or a whisper: 
A flame of rose in the hair, 
A flame of silk at the throat. 



56 



BUFFALO BILL 

Boy heart of Johnny Jones — aching to-day? 
Aching, and Buffalo Bill in town? 
Buffalo Bill and ponies, cowboys, Indians? 

Some of us know 

All about it, Johnny Jones. 

Buffalo Bill is a slanting look of the eyes, 
A slanting look under a hat on a horse. 

He sits on a horse and a passing look is fixed 
On Johnny Jones, you and me, barelegged, 

A slanting, passing, careless look under a hat on a horse. 

Go clickety-clack, O pony hoofs along the street. 

Come on and slant your eyes again, O Buffalo Bill. 

Give us again the ache of our boy hearts. 

Fill us again with the red love of prairies, dark nights, 
lonely wagons, and the crack-crack of rifles sputter- 
ing flashes into an ambush. 



57 



SIXTEEN MONTHS 

On the lips of the child Janet float changing dreams. 

It is a thin spiral of blue smoke, 

A morning campfire at a mountain lake. 

On the lips of the child Janet, 

Wisps of haze on ten miles of corn, 

lYoung light blue calls to young light gold of morning. 



58 



CHILD MARGARET 

The child Margaret begins to write numbers on a Satur- 
day morning, the first numbers formed under her 
wishing child fingers. 

All the numbers come well-born, shaped in figures as- 
sertive for a frieze in a child's room. 

Both I and 7 are straightforward, military, filled 
with lunge and attack, erect in shoulder-straps. 

The 6 and 9 salute as dancing sisters, elder and 
younger, and 2 is a trapeze actor swinging to 
handclaps. 

AH the numbers are well-born, only 3 has a hump on 
its back and 8 is knock-kneed. 

The child Margaret kisses all once and gives two kisses 
to 3 and 8. 

(Each number is a bran-new rag doll. . . O in the 
wishing fingers . . . millions of rag dolls, millions 
and milHons of new rag dolls!!) 



59 



SINGING NIGGER 

Your bony head, Jazbo, O dock walloper, 

Those grappling hooks, those wheelbarrow handlers, 

The dome and the wings of you, nigger, 

The red roof and the door of you, 

I know where your songs came from. 

I know why God listens to your, " Walk All Over God's 
Heaven." 

I heard you shooting craps, " My baby's going to have 
a new dress." 

I heard you in the cinders, *' I'm going to live anyhow 
until I die." 

I saw five of you with a can of beer on a summer night 
and I listened to the five of you harmonizing six 
ways to sing, " Way Down Yonder in the Corn- 
field." 

I went away asking where I come from. 



60 



LEATHER LEGGINGS 



LEATHER LEGGINGS 

They have taken the ball of earth 
and made it a little thing. 

They were held to the land and horses; 

they were held to the little seas. 
They have changed and shaped and welded; 
they have broken the old tools and made 
new ones; they are ranging the white 
scarves of cloudland; they are bumping 
the sunken bells of the Carthaginians 
and Phoenicians : 

they are handling 
the strongest sea 
as a thing to be handled. 

The earth was a call that mocked ; 

it is belted with wires and meshed with 
steel ; from Pittsburg to Vladivostok is 
an iron ride on a moving house; from 
Jerusalem to Tokyo is a reckoned span; 
and they talk at night in the storm and 
salt, the wind and the war. 

tThey have counted the miles to the Sun 

and Canopus ; they have weighed a small 
blue star that comes in the southeast 
corner of the sky on a foretold errand. 
63 



64 Leather Leggings 

We shall search the sea again. 

We shall search the stars again. 

There are no bars across the way. 

There is no end to the plan and the clue, 
the hunt and the thirst. 

The motors are drumming, the leather leggings 
and the leather coats wait : 

Under the sea 

and out to the stars 

we go. 



PRAYERS OF STEEL 

Lay me on an anvil, O God. 

Beat me and hammer me into a crowbar. 

Let me pry loose old walls. 

Let me lift and loosen old foundations. 

Lay me on an anvil, O God. 

Beat me and hammer me into a steel spike. 

Drive me into the girders that hold a skyscraper together. 

Take red-hot rivets and fasten me into the central 

girders. 
Let me be the great nail holding a skyscraper through 

blue nights into white stars. 



65 



ALWAYS THE MOB 

Jesus emptied the devils of one man into forty hogs and 
the hogs took the edge of a high rock and dropped 
off and down into the sea : a mob. 

The sheep on the hills of Australia, blundering four- 
footed in the sunset mist to the dark, they go one 
way, they hunt one sleep, they find one pocket of 
grass for all. 

Karnak? Pyramids? Sphinx paws tall as a coolie? 
Tombs kept for kings and sacred cows? A mob. 

Young roast pigs and naked dancing girls of Belshazzar, 
the room where a thousand sat guzzling when a 
hand wrote: Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin? A mob. 

The honeycomb of green that won the sun as the Hang- 
ing Gardens of Nineveh, flew to its shape at the 
hands of a mob that followed the fingers of Nebu- 
chadnezzar: a mob of one hand and one plan. 

Stones of a circle of hills at Athens, staircases of a 
mountain in Peru, scattered clans of marble dragons 
in China : each a mob on the rim of a sunrise : ham- 
mers and wagons have them now. 

Locks and gates of Panama? The Union Pacific cross- 
ing deserts and tunneling mountains? The Wool- 
66 



Always the Mob 67 

worth on land and the Titanic at sea ? Lighthouses 
bhnking a coast Hne from Labrador to Key West? 
Pigiron bars piled on a barge whistling in a fog 
off Sheboygan ? A mob : hammers and wagons have 
them to-morrow. 

The mob? A typhoon tearing loose an island from 
thousand-year moorings and bastions, shooting a 
volcanic ash with a fire tongue that licks up cities 
and peoples. Layers of worms eating rocks and 
forming loam and valley floors for potatoes, wheat, 
watermelons. 

The mob? A jag of lightning, a geyser, a gravel mass 
loosening. . . 

The mob . . . kills or builds ... the mob is Attila 
or Ghengis Khan, the mob is Napoleon, Lincoln. 

I am bom in the mob — I die in the mob — the same goes 
for you — I don't care who you are. 

I cross the sheets of fire in No Man's land for you, my 
brother — I slip a steel tooth into your throat, you my 
brother — I die for you and I kill you — It is a twisted 
and gnarled thing, a crimson wool : 

One more arch of stars. 
In the night of our mist. 
In the night of our tears. 



JABBERERS 

I RISE out of my depths with my language. 

You rise out of your depths with your language. 

Two tongues from the depths, 

Alike only as a yellow cat and a green parrot are alike, 

Fling their staccato tantalizations 

Into a wildcat jabber 

Over a gossamer web of unanswerables. 

The second and the third silence, 
Even the hundredth silence, 
Is better than no silence at all 

(Maybe this is a jabber too — are we at it again, you 
and I?) 

I rise out of my depths with my language. 
You rise out of your depths with your language. 

One thing there is much of; the name men call it by is 
time; into this gulf our syllabic pronunciamentos 
empty by the way rockets of fire curve and are gone 
on the night sky; into this gulf the jabberings go 
as the shower at a scissors grinder's wheel. . . . 



68 



CARTOON 

I AM making a Cartoon of a Woman. She is the People. 

She is the Great Dirty Mother. 
And Many Children hang on her Apron, crawl at her 

Feet, snuggle at her Breasts. 



69 



INTERIOR 

In the cool of the night time 
The clocks pick off the points 
And the mainsprings loosen. 
They will need winding. 
One of these days . . . 

they will need winding. 

Rabelais in red boards, 

Walt Whitman in green, > 

Hugo in ten-cent paper covers, 

Here they stand on shelves 

In the cool of the night time 

And there is nothing . . . 

To be said against them . . .; 

Or for them . . . 

In the cool of the night time 

And the clocks. 

A man in pigeon-gray pyjamas. 
The open window begins at his feet 
And goes taller than his head. 
Eight feet high is the pattern. 

Moon and mist make an oblong layout. 
Silver at the man's bare feet. 
He swings one foot in a moon silver. 
And it costs nothing. 

One more day of bread and work. 
One more day ... so much rags . 
70 



Interior 71 

The man barefoot in moon silver 
Mutters " You " and " You " 
To things hidden 
In the cool of the night time, 
In Rabelais, Whitman, Hugo, 
In an oblong of moon mist. 

Out from the window . . . prairielands. 
Moon mist whitens a golf ground. 
Whiter yet is a limestone quarry. 
The crickets keep on chirring. 

Switch engines of the Great Western 

Sidetrack box cars, make up trains 

For Weehawken, Oskaloosa, Saskatchewan; 

The cattle, the coal, the corn, must go 

In the night ... on the prairielands. 

Chuff-chuff go the pulses. 

They beat in the cool of the night time. 

Chuff-chuff and chuff-chuff . . . 

These heartbeats travel the night a mile 

And touch the moon silver at the window 

And the bones of the man. 

It costs nothing. 

Rabelais in red boards, 
Whitman in green, 
Hugo in ten-cent paper covers. 
Here they stand on shelves 
In the cool of the night time 
And the clocks. 



STREET WINDOW 

The pawn-shop man knows hunger, 
And how far hunger has eaten the heart 
Of one who comes with an old keepsake. 
Here are wedding rings and baby bracelets, 
Scarf pins and shoe buckles, jeweled garters, 
Old-fashioned knives with inlaid handles. 
Watches of old gold and silver, 
Old coins worn with finger-marks. 
They tell stories. 



73 



PALLADIUMS 

In the newspaper office — who are the spooks? 
Who wears the mythic coat invisible? 

Who pussyfoots from desk to desk 

with a speaking forefinger? 
Who gumshoes amid the copy paper 

with a whispering thumb? 

Speak softly — the sacred cows may hear. 
Speak easy — the sacred cows must be fed. 



73 



CLOCKS 

Here is a face that says half-past seven the same way 
whether a murder or a wedding goes on, whether 
a funeral or a picnic crowd passes. 

A tall one I know at the end of a hallway broods in 
shadows and is watching booze eat out the insides 
of the man of the house ; it has seen five hopes go 
in five years: one woman, one child, and three 
dreams. 

A little one carried in a leather box by an actress rides 
with her to hotels and is under her pillow in a 
sleeping-car between one-night stands. 

One hoists a phiz over a railroad station ; it points num- 
bers to people a quarter-mile away who believe it 
when other clocks fail. 

And of course . . . there are wrist watches over the 
pulses of airmen eager to go to France. . . 



74 



LEGENDS 

CLOWNS DYING 

Five circus clowns dying this year, morning newspapers 
told their lives, how each one horizontal in a last 
gesture of hands arranged by an undertaker, shook 
thousands into convulsions of laughter from behind 
rouge-red lips and powder-white face. 

STEAMBOAT BILL 

When the boilers of the Robert E. Lee exploded, a 
steamboat winner of many races on the Mississippi 
went to the bottom of the river and never again saw 
the wharves of Natchez and New Orleans. 

And a legend lives on that two gamblers were blown 
toward the sky and during their journey laid bets 
on which of the two would go higher and which 
would be first to set foot on the turf of the earth 
again. 

FOOT AND MOUTH PLAGUE 

When the mysterious foot and mouth epidemic ravaged 
the cattle of Illinois, Mrs. Hector Smith wept bit- 
terly over the government killing forty of her soft- 
eyed Jersey cows ; through the newspapers she wept 
over her loss for millions of readers in the Great 
Northwest. 

75 



76 Leather Leggings 

SEVENS 

The lady who has had seven lawful husbands has written 
seven years for a famous newspaper telling how to 
find love and keep it: seven thousand hungry girls 
in the Mississippi Valley have read the instructions 
seven years and found neither illicit loves nor lawful 
husbands. 



PROFITEER 

I who saw ten strong young men die anonymously, I who 
saw ten old mothers hand over their sons to the 
nation anonymously, I who saw ten thousand touch 
the sunlit silver finalities of undistinguished human 
glory — why do I sneeze sardonically at a bronze 
drinking fountain named after one who participated 
in the war vicariously and bought ten farms? 



PSALM OF THOSE WHO GO FORTH BEFORE 
DAYLIGHT 

The policeman buys shoes slow and careful ; the teamster 
buys gloves slow and careful; they take care of 
their feet and hands; they live on their feet and 
hands. 

The milkman never argues; he works alone and no one 
speaks to him; the city is asleep when he is on the 
job; he puts a bottle on six hundred porches and 
calls it a day's work; he climbs two hundred 
wooden stairways ; two horses are company for him ; 
he never argues. 

The rolling-mill men and the sheet-steel men are brothers 
of cinders; they empty cinders out of their shoes 
after the day's work; they ask their wives to fix 
burnt holes in the knees of their trousers; their 
necks and ears are covered with a smut ; they scour 
their necks and ears ; they are brothers of cinders. 



77 



HORSES AND MEN IN RAIN 

Let us sit by a hissing steam radiator a winter's day, 
gray wind pattering frozen raindrops on the window, 

And let us talk about milk wagon drivers and grocery 
delivery boys. 

Let us keep our feet in wool slippers and mix hot 
punches — and talk about mail carriers and mes- 
senger boys slipping along the icy sidewalks. 

Let us write of olden, golden days and hunters of the 
Holy Grail and men called '' knights " riding horses 
in the rain, in the cold frozen rain for ladies they 
loved. 

A roustabout hunched on a coal wagon goes by, icicles 
drip on his hat rim, sheets of ice wrapping the hunks 
of coal, the caravanserai a gray blur in slant of rain. 

Let us nudge the steam radiator with our wool slippers 
and write poems of Launcelot, the hero, and Roland, 
the hero, and all the olden golden men who rode 
horses in the rain. 



78 



QUESTIONNAIRE 

Have I told any man to be a liar for my sake ? 

Have I sold ice to the poor in summer and coal to the 

poor in winter for the sake of daughters who nursed 

brindle bull terriers and led with a leash their dogs 

clothed in plaid wool jackets? 
Have I given any man an earful too much of my talk— 

or asked any man to take a snootful of booze on 

my account? 
Have I put wool in my own ears when men tried to tell 

me what was good for me? Have I been a bum 

listener? 
Have I taken dollars from the living and the unborn 

while I made speeches on the retributions that 

shadow the heels of the dishonest ? 
Have I done any good under cover? Or have I always 

put it in the show windows and the newspapers ? 



79 



NEAR KEOKUK 

Thirty-two Greeks are dipping their feet in a creek. 
Sloshing their bare feet in a cool flow of clear water. 
All one midsummer day ten hours the Greeks 

stand in leather shoes shoveling gravel. 
Now they hold their toes and ankles 

to the drift of running water. 
Then they go to the bunk cars 

and eat mulligan and prune sauce. 
Smoke one or two pipefuls, look at the stars, 

tell smutty stories 
About men and women they have known, 

countries they have seen, 
Railroads they have built — 

and then the deep sleep of children. 



80 



SLANTS AT BUFFALO, NEW YORK 

A FOREFINGER of stonc, dreamed by a sculptor, points to 

the sky. 
It says : This way ! this way ! 

Four lions snore in stone at the corner of the shaft. 
They too are the dream of a sculptor. 
They too say : This way ! this way ! 

The street cars swing at a curve. 

The middle-class passengers witness low life. 

The car windows frame low life all day in pictures. 

Two Italian cellar delicatessens 

sell red and green peppers. 
The Florida bananas furnish a burst of yellow. 
The lettuce and the cabbage give a green. 

Boys play marbles in the cinders. 

The boys' hands need washing. 

The boys are glad ; they fight among each other. 

A plank bridge leaps the Lehigh Valley railroad. 
Then acres of steel rails, freight cars, smoke, 
And then . . . the blue lake shore 
. . . Erie with Norse blue eyes . . . and the white 
sun. 



8i 



FLAT LANDS 

Flat lands on the end of town where real estate men 

are crying new subdivisions, 
The sunsets pour blood and fire over you hundreds and 

hundreds of nights, flat lands — blood and fire of 

sunsets thousands of years have been pouring over 

you. 
And the stars follow the sunsets. One gold star. A 

shower of blue stars. Blurs of white and gray stars. 

Vast marching processions of stars arching over you 

flat lands where frogs sob this April night. 
" Lots for Sale — Easy Terms " run letters painted on a 

board — and the stars wheel onward, the frogs sob 

this April night. 



82 



LAWYER 

When the jury files in to deliver a verdict after weeks 
of direct and cross examinations, hot clashes of 
lawyers and cool decisions of the judge, 

There are points of high silence — twiddling of thumbs 
is at an end — bailiffs near cuspidors take fresh chews 
of tobacco and wait — and the clock has a chance for 
its ticking to be heard. 

A lavv^yer for the defense clears his throat and holds 
himself ready if the word is " Guilty" to enter mo- 
tion for a new trial, speaking in a soft voice, speak- 
ing in a voice slightly colored with bitter wrongs 
mingled with monumental patience, speaking with 
mythic Atlas shoulders of many preposterous, unjust 
circumstances. 



83 



THREE BALLS 

Jabowsky's place is on a side street and only the rain 

washes the dusty three balls. 
When I passed the window a month ago, there rested in 

proud isolation : 
A family bible with hasps of brass twisted off, a wooden 

clock with pendulum gone. 
And a porcelain crucifix with the glaze nicked where 

the left elbow of Jesus is represented. 
I passed to-day and they were all there, resting in proud 

isolation, the clock and the crucifix saying no more 

and no less than before, and a yellow cat sleeping 

in a patch of sun alongside the family bible with 

the hasps off. 
Only the rain washes the dusty three balls in front of 

Jabowsky's place on a side street. 



CHICKS 

The chick in the egg picks at the shell, cracks open one 
oval world, and enters another oval world. 

" Cheep . . . cheep . . . cheep " is the salutation of 
the newcomer, the emigrant, the casual at the gates 
of the new world. 

" Cheep . . . cheep "... from oval to oval, sunset 
to sunset, star to star. 

It is at the door of this house, this teeny weeny egg- 
shell exit, it is here men say a riddle and jeer each 
other : who are you ? where do you go from here ? 

(In the academies many books, at the circus many sacks 
of peanuts, at the club rooms many cigar butts.) 

" Cheep . . . cheep " . . . from oval to oval, sunset 
to sunset, star to star. 



85 



HUMDRUM 

tk 

Tf I had a million lives to live 
and a million deaths to die 
in a million humdrum worlds, 

Fd like to change my name 

and have a new house number to go by- 
each and every time I died 
and started life all over again. 

I wouldn't want the same name every time 
and the same old house number always, 
dying a million deaths, 
dying one by one a million times: 
— would you? 

or you? 

or you ? 



86 



JOLIET 

On the one hand the steel works. 
On the other hand the penitentiary. 
Sante Fe trains and Alton trains 
Between smokestacks on the west 
And gray walls on the east. 
And Lockport down the river. 

Part of the valley is God's. 
And part is man's. 
The river course laid out 
A thousand years ago. 
The canals ten years back. 

The sun on two canals and one river 

Makes three stripes of silver 

Or copper and gold 

Or shattered sunflower leaves. 

Talons of an iceberg 

Scraped out this valley. 

Claws of an avalanche loosed here. 



87 



KNUCKS 

In Abraham Lincoln's city, 

Where they remember his lawyer's shingle. 

The place where they brought him 

Wrapped in battle flags, 

Wrapped in the smoke of memories 

From Tallahassee to the Yukon, 

The place now where the shaft of his tomb 

Points white against the blue prairie dome, 

In Abraham Lincoln's city ... I saw knucks 

In the window of Mister Fischman's second-hand store 

On Second Street. 

I went in and asked, '' How much? '' 

" Thirty cents apiece," answered Mister Fischman. 

And taking a box of new ones off a shelf 

He filled anew the box in the showcase 

And said incidentally, most casually 

And incidentally : 

" I sell a carload a month of these." 

I slipped my fingers into a set of knucks, 
Cast-iron knucks molded in a foundry pattern. 
And there came to me a set of thoughts Hke these : 
Mister Fischman is for Abe and the " malice to none " 

stuff, 
And the street car strikers and the strike-breakers. 
And the sluggers, gunmen, detectives, policemen, 

88 



Knucks 89 

Judges, utility heads, newspapers, priests, lawyers, 
They are all for Abe and the '' malice to none " stuff. 

I started for the door. 

*' Maybe you want a lighter pair," 

Came Mister Fischman's voice. 

I opened the door . . . and the voice again : 

*'You are a funny customer." 

Wrapped in battle flags, 
Wrapped in the smoke of memories. 
This is the place they brought him, 
This is Abraham Lincoln's home town. 



TESTAMENT 

I GIVE the undertakers permission to haul my body 
to the graveyard and to lay away all, the head, the 
feet, the hands, all : I know there is something left 
over they can not put away. 

Let the nanny goats and the billy goats of the shanty 
people eat the clover over my grave and if any yellow 
hair or any blue smoke of flowers is good enough to grow 
over me let the dirty-fisted children of the shanty 
people pick these flowers. 

I have had my chance to live with the people who have 
too much and the people who have too little and I chose 
one of the two and I have told no man why. 



90 



HAUNTS 



VALLEY SONG 

Your eyes and the valley are memories. 

Your eyes fire and the valley a bowl. 

It was here a moonrise crept over the timberline. 

It was here we turned the coffee cups upside down. 

And your eyes and the moon swept the valley. 

I will see you again to-morrow. 

I will see you again in a million years. 

I will never know your dark eyes again. 

These are three ghosts I keep. 

These are three sumach-red dogs I run with. 

All of it wraps and knots to a riddle : 

I have the moon, the timberline, and you. 

All three are gone— and I keep all three. 



93 



IN TALL GRASS 

Bees and a honeycomb in the dried head of a horse in 
a pasture corner — a skull in the tall grass and a 
buzz and a buzz of the yellow honey-hunters. 

And I ask no better a winding sheet 

(over the earth and under the sun.) 

Let the bees go honey-hunting with yellow blur of wings 
in the dome of my head, in the rumbling, singing 
arch of my skull. 

Let there be wings and yellow dust and the drone of 
dreams of honey — who loses and remembers? — who 
keeps and forgets? 

In a blue sheen of moon over the bones and under the 
hanging honeycomb the bees come home and the bees 
sleep. 



94 



UPSTAIRS 

I TOO have a garret of old playthings. 

I have tin soldiers with broken arms upstairs. 

I have a wagon and the wheels gone upstairs. 

I have guns and a drum, a jumping- jack and a magic 

lantern. 
And dust is on them and I never look at them upstairs. 
I too have a garret of old playthings. 



95 



MONOSYLLABIC 

Let me be monosyllabic to-day, O Lord. 
Yesterday I loosed a snarl of words on a fool, 

on a child. 
To-day, let me be monosyllabic ... a crony of old men 

who wash sunlight in their fingers and 

enjoy slow-pacing clocks. 



q6 



FILMS 

I HAVE kept all, not one is thrown away, not one given 

to the ragman, not one thrust in a corner with a 

" P-f-f." 
The red ones and the blue, the long ones in stripes, and 

each of the little black and white checkered ones. 
Keep them: I tell my heart: keep them another year, 

another ten years : they will be wanted again. 
They came once, they came easy, they came like a first 

white flurry of snow in late October, 
Like any sudden, presumptuous, beautiful thing, and they 

were cheap at the price, cheap like snow. 
Here a red one and there a long one in yellow stripes, 
O there shall be no ragman have these yet a year, yet 

ten years. 



97 



KREISLER 

Sell me a violin, mister, of old mysterious wood. 

Sell me a fiddle that has kissed dark nights on the fore- 
head where men kiss sisters they love. 

Sell me dried wood that has ached with passion clutching 
the knees and arms of a storm. 

Sell me horsehair and rosin that has sucked at the breasts 
of the morning sun for milk. 

Sell me something crushed in the heartsblood of pain 
readier than ever for one more song. 



98 



THE SEA HOLD 

The sea is large. 

The sea hold on a leg of land in the Chesapeake hugs 
an early sunset and a last morning star over the 
oyster beds and the late clam boats of lonely men. 

Five white houses on a half-mile strip of land . . . five 
white dice rolled from a tube. 

Not so long ago . . . the sea was large . . . 

And to-day the sea has lost nothing ... it keeps all. 

I am a loon about the sea. 

I make so many sea songs, I cry so many sea cries, I 
forget so many sea songs and sea cries. 

I am a loon about the sea. 

So are five men I had a fish fry with once in a tar-paper 
shack trembling in a sand storm. 

The sea knows more about them than they know them- 
selves. 

They know only how the sea hugs and will not let go. 

The sea is large. 

The sea must know more than any of us. 



99 



GOLDWING MOTH 

A GOLDWING moth is between the scissors and the ink 

bottle on the desk. 
Last night it flew hundreds of circles around a glass bulb 

and a flame wire. 
The wings are a soft gold; it is the gold of illuminated 

initials in manuscripts of the medieval monks. 



100 



LOIN CLOTH 

Body of Jesus taken down from the cross 
Carved in ivory by a lover of Christ, 
It is a child's handful you are here, 
The breadth of a man's finger, 
And this ivory loin cloth 
Speaks an interspersal in the day's work, 
The carver's prayer and whim 
And Christ-love. 



lOX 



HEMLOCK AND CEDAR 

Thin sheets of blue smoke among white slabs . . . 
near the shingle mill . . . winter morning. 

Falling of a dry leaf might be heard . . . circular steel 
tears through a log. 

Slope of woodland . . . brown . . . soft . . . tinge 
of blue such as pansy eyes. 

Farther, field fires . . . funnel of yellow smoke . . . 
spellings of other yellow in corn stubble. 

Bobsled on a down-hill road . . . February snow mud 
. . . horses steaming . . . Oscar the driver sings 
ragtime under a spot of red seen a mile . . . the 
red wool yarn of Oscar's stocking cap is seen from 
the shingle mill to the ridge of hemlock and cedar. 



102 



SUMMER SHIRT SALE 

The summer shirt sale of a downtown haberdasher is 
glorified in a show-window slang : everybody understands 
the language : red dots, yellow circles, blue anchors, and 
dove-brown hooks, these perform explosions in color: 
stripes and checks fight for the possession of front lines 
and saHents: detectives, newsies, teameoes, niggers, all 
stop, look, and listen : the shirt sale and the show window 
kick at the street with a noise joyous as a clog dancer : 
the ensemble is a challenge to the ghost who walks on 
paydays. 



103 



MEDALLION 

The brass medallion profile of your face I keep always. 

It is not jingling with loose change in my pockets. 

It is not stuck up in a show place on the office wall. 

I carry it in a special secret pocket in the day 

And it is under my pillow at night. 

The brass came from a long ways off : it was up against 

hell and high water, fire and flood, before the face 

was put on it. 
It is the side of a head ; a woman wishes ; a woman waits ; 

a woman swears behind silent lips that the sea will 

bring home what is gone. 



104 



BRICKLAYER LOVE 

I THOUGHT of killing myself because I am only a brick- 
layer and you a woman who loves the man who runs 
a drug store. 

I don't care like I used to; I lay bricks straighter than 
I used to and I sing slower handling the trowel 
afternoons. 

When the sun is in my eyes and the ladders are shaky 
and the mortar boards go wrong, I think of you. 



105 



ASHURNATSIRPAL III 

(From Babylonian tablet, 4,000 years Before Christ) 

Three walls around the town of Tela when I came. 
They expected everything of those walls ; 
Nobody in the town came out to kiss my feet. 

I knocked the walls down, killed three thousand soldiers, 
Took away cattle and sheep, took all the loot in sight, 
And burned special captives. 

Some of the soldiers — I cut off hands and feet. 

Others — I cut off ears and fingers. 

Some — I put out the eyes. 

I made a pyramid of heads. 

I strung heads on trees circling the town. 

When I got through with it 

There wasn't much left of the town of Tela. 



106 



MAMMY HUMS 

This is the song I rested with : 

The ri^ht shoulder of a strong man I leaned on. 

The face of the rain that drizzled on the short neck of 

a canal boat. 
The eyes of a child who slept while death went over and 

under. , c - a 

The petals of peony pink that fluttered in a shot of wind 

come and gone. 

This is the song I rested with: 

Head, heels, and fingers rocked to the nigger mammy 

humming of it, to the mile-oi¥ steamboat landmg 

whistle of it. 

The murmurs run with bees' wings 

in a late summer sun. 

They go and come with white surf 

slamming on a beach all day. 

An^then you may sleep with a late afternoon slumber 

ThenTou may slip your head in an elbow knowing 

nothing— only sleep. 
If so you sleep in the house of our song, 
If so you sleep under the apple trees of our song, 
Then the face of sleep must be the one face you were 

looking for. 

107 



BRINGERS 

Cover me over 

In dusk and dust and dreams. 

Cover me over 
And leave me alone. 

Cover me over. 
You tireless, great. 

Hear me and cover me, 

Bringers of dusk and dust and dreams. 



io8 



CRIMSON RAMBLER 

Now that a crimson rambler 

begins to crawl over the house 
of our two lives — 

Now that a red curve 

winds across the shingles — 

Now that hands 

washed in early sunrises 

climb and spill scarlet 

on a white lattice weave — 

Now that a loop of blood 
is written on our roof 
and reaching around a chimney — 

How are the two lives of this house 

to keep strong hands and strong hearts? 



109 



HAUNTS 

There are places I go when I am strong. 
One is a marsh pool where I used to go 

with a long-ear hound-dog. 
One is a wild crabapple tree; I was there 

a moonlight night with a girl. 
The dog is gone ; the girl is gone ; I go to these 

places when there is no other place to go. 



no 



HAVE ME 

Have me in the blue and the sun. 

Have me on the open sea and the mountains. 

When I go into the grass of the sea floor, I will go alone. 
This is where I came from — the chlorine and the salt 

are blood and bones. 
It is here the nostrils rush the air to the lungs. It is 

here oxygen clamors to be let in. 
And here in the root grass of the sea floor I will go alone. 

Love goes far. Here love ends. 
Have me in the blue and the sun. 



Ill 



FIRE DREAMS 

(Written to be read aloud, if so be, Thanksgiving Day) 

I REMEMBER here by the fire, 

In the flickering reds and saffrons, 

They came in a ramshackle tub, 

Pilgrims in tall hats, 

Pilgrims of iron jaws, 

Drifting by weeks on beaten seas, 

And the random chapters say 

They were glad and sang to God. 



And so 

Since the iron-jawed men sat down 

And said, " Thanks, O God,'' 

For life and soup and a little less 

Than a hobo handout to-day. 

Since gray winds blew gray patterns of sleet on Plymouth 

Rock, 
Since the iron-jawed men sang '* Thanks, O God," 
You and I, O Child of the West, 
Remember more than ever 
November and the hunter's moon, 
November and the yellow-spotted hills. 

112 



Fire Dreams 113 

And so 

In the name of the iron-jawed men 

I will stand up and say yes till the finish is come and 

gone. 
God of all broken hearts, empty hands, sleeping soldiers, 
God of all star-flung beaches of night sky, 
I and my love-child stand up together to-day and sing: 

" Thanks, O God." 



BABY FACE 

White Moon comes in on a baby face. 
The shafts across her bed are flimmering. 

Out on the land White Moon shines, 
Shines and ghmmers against gnarled shadows, 
All silver to slow twisted shadows 
Falling across the long road that runs from the 
house. 

Keep a little of your beauty 
And some of your flimmering silver 
For her by the window to-night 
Where you come in, White Moon. 



114 



THE YEAR 



A STORM of white petals, 
Buds throwing open baby fists 
Into hands of broad flowers. 

II 

Red roses running upward, 
Clambering to the clutches of life 
Soaked in crimson. 

Ill 

Rabbles of tattered leaves 
Holding golden flimsy hopes 
Against the tramplings 
Into the pits and gullies. 

IV 

Hoarfrost and silence : 

Only the muffling 

Of winds dark and lonesome — 

Great lullabies to the long sleepers. 



"S 



DRUMNOTES * 

Days of the dead men, Danny. 
Drum for the dead, drum on your 
remembering heart. 

Jaures, a great love-heart of France, 
a slug of lead in the red valves. 

Kitchener of Khartoum, tall, cold, proud, 
a shark's mouthful. 

Franz Josef, the old man of forty haunted 
kingdoms, in a tomb with the Hapsburg 
fathers, moths eating a green uniform 
to tatters, worms taking all and leaving 
only bones and gold buttons, bones and 
iron crosses. 

Jack London, Jim Riley, Verhaeren, riders to 
the republic of dreams. 

Days of the dead, Danny. 

Drum on your remembering heart. 

•Copyright. Dodd, Mead & Co. 



Il6 



MOONSET 

Leaves of poplars pick Japanese prints against the west. 
Moon sand on the canal doubles the changing pictures. 

The moon's good-by ends pictures. 
The west is empty. All else is empty. No moon-talk 
at all now. 

Only dark listening to dark. 



117 



GARDEN WIRELESS 

How many feet ran with sunlight, water, and air? 

What Httle devils shaken of laughter, cramming their 
little ribs with chuckles. 

Fixed this lone red tulip, a woman's mouth of passion 
kisses, a nun's mouth of sweet thinking, here topping 
a straight line of green, a pillar stem ? 

Who hurled this bomb of red caresses ? — nodding balloon- 
film shooting its wireless every fraction of a second 
these June days : 

Love me before I die; 

Love me — love me now. 



Ii8 



HANDFULS 

Blossoms of babies 
Blinking their stories 
Come soft 

On the dusk and the babble ; 
Little red gamblers, 
Handfuls that slept in the dust. 

Summers of rain, 
Winters of drift, 
Tell off the years; 
And they go back 
Who came soft — 
Back to the sod, 
To silence and dust; 
Gray gamblers, 

Handfuls again. 



119 



COOL TOMBS 

When Abraham Lincoln was shoveled into the tombs, 
he forgot the copperheads and the assassin . . . 
in the dust, in the cool tombs. 

And Ulysses Grant lost all thought of con men and Wall 
Street, cash and collateral turned ashes ... in the 
dust, in the cool tombs. 

Pocahontas' body, lovely as a poplar, sweet as a red haw 
in November or a pawpaw in May, did she wonder? 
does she remember? ... in the dust, in the cool 
tombs ? 

Take any streetful of people buying clothes and groceries, 
cheering a hero or throwing confetti and blowing 
tin horns . . . tell me if the lovers are losers . . . 
tell me if any get more than the lovers ... in the 
dust ... in the cool tombs. 



120 



SHENANDOAH 



SHENANDOAH 

In the Shenandoah Valley, one rider gray and one rider 
blue, and the sun on the riders wondering. 

Piled in the Shenandoah, riders blue and riders gray, 
piled with shovels, one and another, dust in the 
Shenandoah taking them quicker than mothers take 
children done with play. 

The blue nobody remembers, the gray nobody remembers, 
it's all old and old nowadays in the Shenandoah. 

And all is young, a butter of dandelions slung on the 
turf, climbing blue flowers of the wishing woodlands 
wondering: a midnight purple violet claims the sun 
among old heads, among old dreams of repeating 
heads of a rider blue and a rider gray in the 
Shenandoah. 



123 



NEW FEET 

Empty battlefields keep their phantoms. 
Grass crawls over old gun wheels 
And a nodding Canada thistle flings a purple 
Into the summer's southwest wind, 
Wrapping a root in the rust of a bayonet, 
Reaching a blossom in rust of shrapnel. 



124 



OLD OSAWATOMIE 

John Brown's body under the morning stars. 
Six feet of dust under the morning stars. 
And a panorama of war performs itself 
Over the six-foot stage of circling armies. 
Room for Gettysburg, Wilderness, Chickamauga, 
On a six-foot stage of dust. 



125 



GRASS 

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. 
Shovel them under and let me work — 

I am the grass ; I cover all. 

And pile them high at Gettysburg 

And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun. 

Shovel them under and let me work. 

Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor 

What place is this? 

Where are we now ? 

I am the grass. 
Let me work. 



126 



FLANDERS 

Flanders, the name of a place, a country of people, 
Spells itself with letters, is written in books. 

" Where is Flanders ? " was asked one time, 
Flanders known only to those who lived there 
And milked cows and made cheese and spoke the home 
language. 

" Where is Flanders ? " was asked. 

And the slang adepts shot the reply : Search me. 

A few thousand people milking cows, raising radishes. 
On a land of salt grass and dunes, sand-swept with a 

sea-breath on it : 
This was Flanders, the unknown, the quiet. 
The place where cows hunted lush cuds of green on 

lowlands, 
And the raw-boned plowmen took horses with long 

shanks 
Out in the dawn to the sea-breath. 

Flanders sat slow-spoken amid slow-swung windmills, 
Slow-circling windmill arms turning north or west. 
Turning to talk to the swaggering winds, the childish 

winds. 
So Flanders sat with the heart of a kitchen girl 
Washing wooden bowls in the winter sun by a window. 



127 



GARGOYLE 

I SAW a mouth jeering. A smile of melted red iron ran 

over it. Its laugh was full of nails rattling. It 

was a child's dream of a mouth. 
A fist hit the mouth : knuckles of gun-metal driven by an 

electric wrist and shoulder. It was a child's dream 

of an arm. 
The fist hit the mouth over and over, again and again. 

The mouth bled melted iron, and laughed its laughter 

of nails rattling. 
And I saw the more the fist pounded the more the mouth 

laughed. The fist is pounding and pounding, and 

the mouth answering. 



is8 



OLD TIMERS 

I AM an ancient reluctant conscript. 

On the soup wagons of Xerxes I was a cleaner of pans. 

On the march of Miltiades' phalanx I had a haft and 

head; 
I had a bristling gleaming spear-handle. 

Red-headed Caesar picked me for a teamster. 
He said, " Go to work, you Tuscan bastard, 
Rome calls for a man who can drive horses." 

The units of conquest led by Charles the Twelfth, 
The whirling whimsical Napoleonic columns : 
They saw me one of the horseshoers. 

I trimmed the feet of a white horse Bonaparte swept the 
night stars with. 

Lincoln said, " Get into the game ; your nation takes 

you." 
And I drove a wagon and team and I had my arm shot off 
At Spottsylvania Court House. 

I am an ancient reluctant conscript. 



129 



HOUSE 

Two Swede families live downstairs and an Irish police- 
man upstairs, and an old soldier, Uncle Joe. 

Two Swede boys go upstairs and see Joe. His wife is 
dead, his only son is dead, and his two daughters 
in Missouri and Texas don't want him around. 

The boys and Uncle Joe crack walnuts with a hammer 
on the bottom of a flatiron while the January wind 
howls and the zero air weaves laces on the window 
glass. 

Joe tells the Swede boys all about Chickamauga and Chat- 
tanooga, how the Union soldiers crept in rain some- 
where a dark night and ran forward and killed many 
Rebels, took flags, held a hill, and won a victory 
told about in the histories in school. 

Joe takes a piece of carpenter's chalk, draws lines on 
the floor and piles stove wood to show where six 
regiments were slaughtered climbing a slope. 

" Here they went " and " Here they went," says Joe, 
and the January wind howls and the zero air weaves 
laces on the window glass. 

The two Swede boys go downstairs with a big blur of 
guns, men, and hills in their heads. They eat her- 
ring and potatoes and tell the family war is a wonder 
and soldiers are a wonder. 

One breaks out with a cry at supper: I wish we had a 
war now and I could be a soldier. 



130 



JOHN ERICSSON DAY MEMORIAL, 1918 

Into the gulf and the pit of the dark night, the cold 
night, there is a man goes into the dark and the 
cold and when he comes back to his people he brings 
fire in his hands and they remember him in the years 
afterward as the fire bringer — they remember or 
forget — the man whose head kept singing to the 
want of his home, the want of his people. 

For this man there is no name thought of — ^he has 
broken from jungles and the old oxen and the old 
wagons — circled the earth with ships — ^belted the 
earth with steel — swung with wings and a drumming 
motor in the high blue sky — shot his words on a 
wireless way through shattering sea storms: — out 
from the night and out from the jungles his head 
keeps singing — there is no road for him but on and 
on. 

Against the sea bastions and the land bastions, against 
the great air pockets of stars and atoms, he points 
a finger, finds a release clutch, touches a button no 
man knew before. 

The soldier with a smoking gun and a gas mask— the 
workshop man under the smokestacks and the blue- 
prints—these two are brothers of the handshake 
never forgotten — for these two we give the salt 
tears of our eyes, the salute of red roses, the flame- 
won scarlet of poppies. 
131 



132 Shenandoah 

For the soldier -who gives all, for the workshop man who 
gives all, for these the red bar is on the flag — ^the 
red bar is the heart's-blood of the mother who gave 
him, the land that gave him. 

The gray foam and the great wheels of war go by and 
take all — and the years give mist and ashes — and our 
feet stand at these, the memory places of the known 
and the unknown, and our hands give a flame-won 
poppy — our hands touch the red bar of a flag for the 
sake of those who gave — and gave all. 



REMEMBERED WOMEN 

For a woman's face remembered as a spot of quick light 
on the flat land of dark night, 

For this memory of one mouth and a forehead they go 
on in the gray rain and the mud, they go on among 
the boots and guns. 

The horizon ahead is a thousand fang flashes, it is a row 
of teeth that bite on the flanks of night, the horizon 
sings of a new kill and a big kill. 

The horizon behind is a wall of dark etched with a 
memory, fixed with a woman's face — they fight on 
and on, boots in the mud and heads in the gray 
rain — for the women they hate and the women they 
love — for the women they left behind, they fight on. 



133 



OUT OF WHITE LIPS 

Out of white lips a question : Shall seven million dead 
ask for their blood a little land for the living wives 
and children, a little land for the living brothers 
and sisters? 

Out of white lips : — Shall they have only air that sweeps 
round the earth for breath of their nostrils and no 
footing on the dirt of the earth for their battle- 
drabbed, battle-soaked shoes ? 

Out of white lips: — Is the red in the flag the blood of 
a free man on a piece of land his own or is it the 
red of a sheep slit in the throat for mutton? 

Out of white lips a white pain murmurs : Who shall have 
land? Him who has stood ankle deep in the blood 
of his comrades, in the red trenches dug in the land ? 



134 



MEMOIR 

Papa Joffre, the shoulders of him wide as the land of 
France. 



We look on the shoulders filling the stage of the Chicago 
Auditorium. 



A fat mayor has spoken much English and the mud of 
his speech is crossed with quicksilver hisses elusive 
and rapid from floor and gallery. 



A neat governor speaks English and the listeners ring 
chimes to his clear thoughts. 



Joffre speaks a few words in French; this is a voice of 
the long firing line that runs from the salt sea dunes 
of Flanders to the white spear crags of the Swiss 
mountains. 



This is the man on whose yes and no has hung the death 

of battalions and brigades ; this man speaks of the 

tricolor of his country now melted in a great resolve 

with the starred bunting of Lincoln and Washington. 

135 



136 Shenandoah 

This is the hero of the Marne, massive, irreckonable ; 
he lets tears roll down his cheek; they trickle a wet 
salt off his chin onto the blue coat. 



There is a play of American hands and voices equal to 
sea-breakers and a lift of white sun on a stony 
beach. 



A MILLION YOUNG WORKMEN, 1915 

A MILLION young workmen straight and strong lay stiff 
on the grass and roads, 

And the million are now under soil and their rottening 
flesh will in the years feed roots of blood-red roses. 

Yes, this million of young workmen slaughtered one 
another and never saw their red hands. 

And oh, it would have been a great job of killing and a 
new and beautiful thing under the sun if the miUion 
knew why they hacked and tore each other to death. 

The kings are grinning, the kaiser and the czar — they 
are aHve riding in leather-seated motor cars, and 
they have their women and roses for ease, and they 
eat fresh-poached eggs for breakfast, new butter on 
toast, sitting in tall water-tight houses reading the 
news of war. 

I dreamed a million ghosts of the young workmen rose in 
their shirts all soaked in crimson . . . and yelled: 

God damn the grinning kings, God damn the kaiser and 
the czar. 

Chicago, 191 5. 



137 



SMOKE 

I SIT in a chair and read the newspapers. 

Millions of men go to war, acres of them are buried, 
guns and ships broken, cities burned, villages sent 
up in smoke, and children where cows are killed 
off amid hoarse barbecues vanish like finger-rings 
of smoke in a north wind. 

I sit in a chair and read the newspapers. 



138 



A TALL MAN 

The mouth of this man is a gaunt strong mouth. 
The head of this man is a gaunt strong head. 

The jaws of this man are bone of the Rocky Mountains, 

the Appalachians. 
The eyes of this man are chlorine of two sobbing oceans, 
Foam, salt, green, wind, the changing unknown. 
The neck of this man is pith of buffalo prairie, old 

longing and new beckoning of corn belt or cotton 

belt, 
Either a proud Sequoia trunk of the wilderness 
Or huddling lumber of a sawmill waiting to be a roof. 

Brother mystery to man and mob mystery. 

Brother cryptic to lifted cryptic hands, 

He is night and abyss, he is white sky of sun, he is the 

head of the people. 
The heart of him the red drops of the people, 
The wish of him the steady gray-eagle crag-hunting 

flights of the people. 

Humble dust of a wheel-worn road. 

Slashed sod under the iron-shining plow. 

These of service in him, these and many cities, many 
borders, many wrangles between Alaska and the 
Isthmus, between the Isthmus and the Horn, and 
east and west of Omaha, and east and west of Paris, 
Berlin, Petrograd. 

139 



T40 Shenandoah 

The blood in his right wrist and the blood in his left 
wrist run with the right wrist wisdom of the many 
and the left wrist wisdom of the many. 

It is the many he knows, the gaunt strong hunger of 
the many. 



THE FOUR BROTHERS 

Notes for War Songs (November, 1917) 

Make war songs out of these ; 

Make chants that repeat and weave. 

Make rhythms up to the ragtime chatter of the machine 

guns; 
Make slow-booming psalms up to the boom of the big 

guns. 
Make a marching song of swinging arms and swinging 

legs, 

Going along, 
Going along, 
On the roads from San Antonio to Athens, from Seattle 

to Bagdad — 
The boys and men in winding lines of khaki, the circling 

squares of bayonet points. 

Cowpunchers, cornhuskers, shopmen, ready in khaki; 
Ballplayers, lumberjacks, ironworkers, ready in khaki; 
A million, ten million, singing, " I am ready." 
This the sun looks on between two seaboards. 
In the land of Lincoln, in the land of Grant and Lee. 

I heard one say, " I am ready to be killed." 
I heard another say, " I am ready to be killed." 

sunburned clear-eyed boys! 

1 stand on sidewalks and you go by with drums and guns 

and bugles, 

141 



142 Shenandoah 

You — and the flag! 
And my heart tightens, a fist of something feels my throat 

When you go by, 
You on the kaiser hunt, you and your faces saying, " I 
am ready to be killed." 

They are hunting death, 

Death for the one-armed mastoid kaiser. 

They are after a Hohenzollern head : 

There is no man-hunt of men remembered like this. 

The four big brothers are out to kill. 

France, Russia, Britain, America — 

The four republics are sworn brothers to kill the kaiser. 

Yes, this is the great man-hunt ; 

And the sun has never seen till now 

Such a line of toothed and tusked man-killers. 

In the blue of the upper sky. 

In the green of the undersea, 

In the red of winter dawns. 

Eating to kill. 

Sleeping to kill, 

Asked by their mothers to kill. 

Wished by four-fifths of the world to kill — 

To cut the kaiser's throat. 

To hack the kaiser's head, 

To hang the kaiser on a high-horizon gibbet. 

And is it nothing else than this? 

Three times ten million men thirsting the blood 

Of a half-cracked one-armed child of the German kings? 

Three times ten million men asking the blood 



The Four Brothers 143 

Of a child born with his head wrong-shaped. 

The blood of rotted kings in his veins? 

If this were all, O God, 

I would go to the far timbers 

And look on the gray wolves 

Tearing the throats of moose: 

I would ask a wilder drunk of blood. 



Look! It is four brothers in joined hands together. 

The people of bleeding France, 

The people of bleeding Russia, 

The people of Britain, the people of America — 
These are the four brothers, these are the four republics. 

At first I said it in anger as one who clenches his fist in 
wrath to fling his knuckles into the face of some one 
taunting ; 

Now I say it calmly as one who has thought it over and 
over again at night, among the mountains, by the sea- 
combers in storm. 

I say now, by God, only fighters to-day will save the 
world, nothing but fighters will keep alive the names 
of those who left red prints of bleeding feet at Valley 
Forge in Christmas snow. 

On the cross of Jesus, the sword of Napoleon, the skull 
of Shakespeare, the pen of Tom Jefferson, the ashes 
of Abraham Lincoln, or any sign of the red and 
running life poured out by the mothers of the world. 

By the God of morning glories climbing blue the doors 
of quiet homes, by the God of tall hollyhocks laugh- 
ing glad to children in peaceful valleys, by the God 
of new mothers wishing peace to sit at windows 
nursing babies, 



144 Shenandoah 

I swear only reckless men, ready to throw away their 
lives by hunger, deprivation, desperate clinging to 
a single purpose imperturbable and undaunted, men 
with the primitive guts of rebellion. 

Only fighters gaunt with the red brand of labor's sorrow 
on their brows and labor's terrible pride in their 
blood, men with souls asking danger — only these 
will save and keep the four big brothers. 

Good-night is the word, good-night to the kings, to the 

czars. 

Good-night to the kaiser. 
The breakdown and the fade-away begins. 
The shadow of a great broom, ready to sweep out the 

trash, is here. 

One finger is raised that counts the czar. 

The ghost who beckoned men who come no more — 

The czar gone to the winds on God's great dustpan, 

The czar a pinch of nothing. 

The last of the gibbering Romanoffs. 

Out and good-night — 
The ghosts of the summer palaces 
And the ghosts of the winter palaces ! 
Out and out, good-night to the kings, the czars, the 
kaisers. 

Another finger will speak. 

And the kaiser, the ghost who gestures a hundred million 

sleeping-waking ghosts, 
The kaiser will go onto God's great dustpan — 
The last of the gibbering HohenzoUems. 

OCT -4 1945 



The Four Brothers I45 

Look! God pities this trash, God waits with a broom 

and a dustpan, 
God knows a finger will speak and count them out. 

It is written in the stars ; 

It is spoken on the walls ; 

It dicks in the fire-white zigzag of the Atlantic wireless; 

It mutters in the bastions of thousand-mile continents ; 

It sings in a whistle on the midnight winds from Walla 

Walla to Mesopotamia : 
Out and good-night. 

The millions slow in khaki, 

The millions learning Turkey in the Straw and John^ 
Brown's Body, 

The millions remembering windrows of dead at Gettys- 
burg, Chickamauga, and Spottsylvania Court House, 

The millions dreaming of the morning star of Appo- 
mattox, 

The millions easy and calm with guns and steel, planes 
and prows : 

There is a hammering, drumming hell to come. 
The killing gangs are on the way. 

God takes one year for a job. 

God takes ten years or a million. 

God knows when a doom is written. 

God knows this job will be done and the words spoken: 

Out and good-night. 

The red tubes will run, 

And the great price be paid. 

And the homes empty, 

And the wives wishing. 

And the mothers wishing. 



146 Shenandoah 

There is only one way now, only the way of the red tubes 
and the great price. 

Well . . . 
Maybe the morning sun is a hve-cent yellow balloon, 
And the evening stars the joke of a God gone crazy. 
Maybe the mothers of the world, 
And the life that pours from their torsal folds — 
Maybe it's all a lie sworn by liars. 
And a God with a cackling laughter says : 
'* I, the Almighty God, 
I have made all this, 
I have made it for kaisers, czars, and kings." 

Three times ten million men say: No. 
Three times ten million men say: 

God is a God of the People. 
And the God who made the world 

And fixed the morning sun. 

And flung the evening stars, 

And shaped the baby hands of life. 
This is the God of the Four Brothers ; 
This is the God of bleeding France and bleeding Russia ; 
This is the God of the people of Britain and America. 

The graves from the Irish Sea to the Caucasus peaks are 

ten times a million. 
The stubs and stumps of arms and legs, the eyesockets 

empty, the cripples, ten times a million. 
The crimson thumb-print of this anathema is on the door 

panels of a hundred million homes. 
Cows gone, mothers on sick-beds, children cry a hunger 

and no milk comes in the noon-time or at night. 



The Four Brothers 147 

The death-yells of it all, the torn throats of men in 
ditches calling for water, the shadows and the hack- 
ing lungs in dugouts, the steel paws that clutch and 
squeeze a scarlet drain day by day — the storm of 
it is hell. 

But look ! child ! the storm is blowing for a clean air. 

Look ! the four brothers march 
And hurl their big shoulders 
And swear the job shall be done. 

Out of the wild finger-writing north and south, east and 
west, over the blood-crossed, blood-dusty ball of 
earth, 

Out of it all a God who knows is sweeping clean, 

Out of it all a God who sees and pierces through, is 
breaking and cleaning out an old thousand years, is 
making ready for a new thousand years. 

The four brothers shall be five and more. 

Under the chimneys of the winter time the children of 

the world shall sing new songs. 
Among the rocking restless cradles the mothers of the 

world shall sing new sleepy-time songs. 



ROBERT FROST 

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